With youth unemployment at record levels, Max Davidson considers the bleak
outlook for students who thought a degree would be a passport to prosperity

"I'm a little worried about my future," said Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. He should be so lucky. All he had to worry about was whether to have an affair with Mrs Robinson. In the halcyon Sixties, that was the sum total of post-graduation anxiety syndrome.

Hoffman's modern counterparts are not so fortunate. The Mrs Robinsons aren't sitting around at home any more, seducing graduates. They are out in the workplace, doing the high-powered jobs the graduates want, but cannot get. For those fresh out of university, desperate for work but unable to get it, there is a savage imbalance between supply and demand. And there is no narrowing of the gap in sight.

The latest unemployment figures, released yesterday, show that 746,000 of 18-24 year-olds are unemployed – a record rate of 18 per cent. Many of those will have graduated this summer. They are not panicking yet, but as the job rejections mount up, they are beginning to feel alarmed.

Others – fewer in number, but now past the panic stage and plunged deeper and deeper into depression – graduated in summer 2008, nearly 18 months ago. I know one of them, the son of friends. He went to one of the country's top grammar schools, got a place at Warwick University, worked hard, got a 2:1 in maths – maths, note, not something wishy-washy like media studies – and is still living at home with his parents, doing shift work at the local pub. The only maths he needs to know is the cost of a pint of bitter.

He would be a tragic figure, a one-man paradise lost, if his plight were not so common. Graduates struggling to get jobs commensurate with their qualifications are becoming sadly familiar.

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My elder daughter is a medical student, two years from graduating. She should be all right. We have not yet got to the point where there is no work for doctors. But looking across the spectrum of her university friends – studying a whole range of subjects, from history to theoretical physics – it is hard to say that most of them can be 100 per cent sure of good professional careers. There are too many obstacles in their path.

My younger daughter has just got a place at Oxford which, a generation ago, was a fail-safe passport to a decent job. But she is studying theology, poor lamb. Heaven only knows what a mere Oxford theology degree will be worth by the time she graduates. She will just have to pray.

Of course, it is easy to blame the Government and, in particular, the target that Labour has long trumpeted – 50 per cent of school-leavers in higher education. That was not too smart. The Government has not only failed to meet its target – the actual figure is still closer to 40 per cent – but it has raised expectations to unrealistic levels.

Parents feel as badly let down as the young people themselves. Middle-class families see their graduate offspring on the dole queue and wonder why they bothered shelling out on school fees. Working-class families feel an even keener sense of disappointment. For many such families, getting a child into university was the fulfilment of a lifelong dream. It represented upward social and financial mobility. It was proof that they were living in a dynamic, economically successful country. That dream does not seem so rosy now.

Graduate unemployment is not, ultimately, a political problem, susceptible to easy political solutions. Job-creation schemes for graduates are very low down in ministerial in-trays. If David Cameron's Conservatives had a brilliant wheeze for guaranteeing every graduate a well-paid job, they would have unveiled it by now. It is a social problem, though a more deep-seated social problem than people perhaps realise.

The life of a student used to be pretty straightforward, all things considered. You had to work hard at school to get into university, but once you had got there, you were on a magic carpet that would take you, via a bit of pot-smoking and binge-drinking, to the higher echelons of society: a secure job; a decent income; your own flat by the time you were 25; your own house by the time you were 30; a manageable mortgage; a pension plan; spare cash for school fees; then the same magic carpet for your own children.

There wasn't room on the magic carpet for everyone, but almost anyone could get on the carpet, provided only that they buckled down at school and worked hard enough to get the exam grades they needed. Now, with mounting graduate unemployment, schools will struggle to convince children that a Good University, that shining city on the hill, is everything it is cracked up to be. There is a whole world of anxiety and disillusion behind those bald employment figures.